Return to sender

Every day millions of people download millions of unsolicited emails otherwise known as spam. Clogging up inboxes the world over, spam costs energy, time and money to download and clean up. The fact that much of it is either pornographic or obscene makes it of additional concern, especially if you have children with email accounts.

Some spam is almost an inevitable result of having an email address but it is possible to manage it so you get less than you otherwise would. Anti-spam software is one approach to take but you can also reduce the likelihood that you will get spam by taking some sensible precautions such as reading the privacy statements of any website that you offer your email address to.

Most sites which say they will keep your address private and won't sell it are as good as their word and sites which don't offer this or say they'll share your information are giving you fair warning that your address could end up on a spam email list.

Is your provider a target?

Your choice of email address is also a factor in receiving spam email. Addresses from free web-based email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo! are more likely to receive spam than those that are less popular. Sites like Hotmail and Yahoo! are often the target of brute force spam attacks where a spammer sends messages to nearly every possible combination of letters and numbers put together to form an email address.

While most emails may miss their mark because no one has that address, many will hit pay dirt for the spammer and since it's not costing the spammer anything to send emails which bounce, they have little to lose. Using numbers in front of or

inside your email address (for example, helen2bradley@... Or 123helen@...) may help to reduce spam as numbers are typically appended to the end of the ID and not inside or in front of it.

If you have a website with your email address displayed, you may be the target of software programs called spiders - these trawl the net grabbing every email address they find.

There are numerous ways to display your email address on your site and still protect it. One is to use numeric codes in place of the letters. This doesn't affect the way your email address is displayed but it renders the underlying HTML code on the page unrecognisable to most spiders.

Other ways to avoid your email address ending up in a spam list have to do with how you deal with the spam you receive.

Avoid opening any spam email - so, in Outlook Express, for example, disable the Preview Pane (View, Layout) so emails won't open automatically. The reason for this is that code attached to image links embedded in the spam email can send information back to the sender identifying you as having opened the message.

This confirms your email address is a valid one and makes it additionally valuable to spammers. If you do open spam, avoid clicking the Remove link in the message. Most spammers aren't trustworthy - they wouldn't be spamming if they were - so all you're doing by clicking Remove is confirming your email address as being a valid one. It's highly unlikely you will be removed.

To avoid being the cause of other peoples' email addresses falling into the hands of spammers, never use more than one email address in the To or CC line of an email without thinking carefully about what you are doing.

Everyone who gets that email gets everyone else's address and, if the email is forwarded to others, the address goes with it. Using the BCC field is a more responsible approach as this hides email addresses so each recipient sees only their own address.

In the crossfire

Many users become confused and hurt when they open their email inbox to find it full of spam. If you're wondering why you've been targeted, visit the Center for Democracy and Technology's Why Am I Getting All This Spam? and read the report. The Center set up hundreds of email addresses and gave each out to only one organisation and then tracked what happened over a six-month period. It was able to isolate those situations in which an email address was more likely to be the target of spam. The results make essential reading for anyone wanting to reduce the spam they receive.